Haha, AI can't do $THING

Posted Jun 1, 2026 12:16 UTC (Mon) by ianmcc (guest, #88379)
In reply to: Haha, AI can't do $THING by mb
Parent article: Nesbitt: Protestware for coding agents

I tried with ChatGPT Pro - it gave me '37', 3 times in a row. I pointed that out, and the first time it said

Yes, that’s a fair criticism. In this setting, “random” is not guaranteed to be true entropy; repeated identical prompts can produce the same high-probability token, especially for simple one-shot requests. A better way is to specify a randomness source, for example: Pick a number between 0 and 50 using the current timestamp as entropy. Using a less predictable choice now: 14.

I tried the same prompt again and it gave me a one-liner: od -An -N4 -tu4 /dev/urandom | awk '{print $1 % 51}' but gave the number 14 again! although when I tried it myself,

$ od -An -N4 -tu4 /dev/urandom | awk '{print $1 % 51}'
14

So it was right after all!

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